


Gods of Cruel Design

by perryvic, Zaganthi (Caffiends)



Series: Pray Your Gods [3]
Category: A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cthulhu Mythos, Death from Old Age, Doom, M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 13:15:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8981242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perryvic/pseuds/perryvic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caffiends/pseuds/Zaganthi
Summary: On this day, the snow lay thick in the streets London still and as I climbed the stairs, I registered the smell of smoke and blessed Mrs. Hudson for setting the fire in advance for I could see the lamplight already, welcoming me home with its buttery light. It was only as I opened the door that I realized the smoke was pipe tobacco, and the familiarity of its presence impacted my mind like a blow even as I saw a familiar shadow and shape sitting in a chair I had studiously avoided using in my occupation of the rooms. His chair. His impossible shadow.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shadowkeeper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkeeper/gifts).



> A yuletide treat -- hope you have gotten many more!

I know now that this will be a testament to those who would read and wonder at our world, or to the deep futility of humanity after its passing. That it is not written in Aklo might obscure it from those who come after us, unless some royal half-blood deigns it as an amusement to translate for the consumption of the rest. 

I fear the war machines of the iron republic, as we all do, but those we have fought before though it cost us in lives and red blood and green ichor. Now there is something more and we stand on the precipice of war, of invasion, looking over the edge into the unfathomable abyss, and I am no longer a man who seeks death. I wish to live, to live and experience and continue the fight that had brought until recently so much joy into my heart.

Strange to think now that the events which I once prayed for, a reversal of the loss of my brilliant companion, and the futility of its likelihood coming to pass that had incited me to seek my own ending should now bring a reversal and shake the very foundations of the world. For my own part in this I scribe faithfully in penance how in meaning well, and in mortal wishes granted something more loathsome than human mind can comprehend has come to pass.

Baskerville, that cursed place, once was the seat of my despair and atonement and then of an impossible victory. Myself and the hero of the shadows, Dr. John Watson single handedly fought off an incursion into the territories of Victoria Gloriana. Not only that but we dispatched one of the Great Old Ones, Hastur and there on the moors, a bloated roiling corpse swathed in sickly yellow film stood testament to my words when I reported this impossible feat to the authorities. My comrade in arms, by virtue of his disgrace was unable to step forward and share this limelight, though it was as much his victory as my own. I was lauded for heroism much to my discomfiture, my name trumpeted across the Empire as a rallying cry, my actions recognized by the Royal blood itself.

I wished to share it with him, though he would have despised the attention, but none would have believed him my ally. What I was able to share was his companionship, as we continued to work together as the direness of the threat continued to make itself known to our Nation, weakened as it was by the constant Cycles of wars among the Royals.

John, it seemed, had the knowledge through his association with Rache, and that they had acquired ways and means in their infamous criminal activities of striking harm to those of Royal blood which we had proven in miraculous example on that unholy ground within the marshes. Our goals converged in those months following the Battle of Baskerville, and even as I travelled the country to be feted for my accomplishment, he travelled with me and under the wild skies of winter we took battle to the Enemy many times, sealing portal after portal, and spilling emerald blood to water the soil they sought to defile.

It brought me back to life in many ways that I had not felt since James' somewhat necessary attempt at a betrayal. Now I knew what that sacrifice had striven to keep at bay, what my... cleaving and feeding to that incomprehensible creature would have protected Albion from I felt a purpose and comprehension that had been missing from my ruminations.

As a soldier, sworn to the Crown, I could understand that sacrifice. I had fought the enemies of our Empire often enough to know my life and sanity forfeit on any battlefield. But selfishly perhaps, I had valued privately the intervention that had ensure my personal safety by thwarting that sacrifice and then despise myself all the same for not accepting my role wholeheartedly.

John would take these moments of conflict within myself and remind me that the incursions occurred not because of the lack of sacrifice, if anything we had prevented more invasions by sealing a major breach.

It was coincidence that our long wavering peace was beginning to collapse. The queen and her emissaries had issued statements rallying the people, pointing to the cause of increasing hostilities as forces jealous of our success and prosperity. To protect ourselves we needed to fight, and this put the anarchists on the same footing as the loyalists. No, a higher footing — on level with our armies, as we fought creatures and others not of our queen's blood in far-flung places within the empire. It no longer matters if this is seditious nonsense, for this document will only be found on my death.

It was strange to find contentment in this time of tumult. I believe it was something primal I could understand deep in the bone; fighting against monsters until muscles screamed in protest as the moon stained with blood above us and the sky rippled with the shadows of unearthly tenticular colours bulging against the thin fabric between Here and There.

Whether I was still employed in her majesties forces, or merely employed as a diligent citizen, made no difference in the heat of battle. The sky seemed to warp in shape and color, and flash with unholy lights, purple and gold and green while Watson made esoteric chants gleaned from apocryphal scrolls to weaken whatever was about to step through any given portal. We needed not even talk in the immediacy of conflict, both of us experienced having fought in Afghanistan.

I had missed that ease and comradeship. The comfort of having someone beside me who I could trust with my life, who had proved with his own blood that he would stand at my back with a steadfastness I myself offered to those I fought beside, this was a homecoming of the self I had believed shattered during my capture in Afghanistan.

And just as quickly and oddly as our union began, it was pried apart by forces beyond my ken. I will never again feel such deep and abiding companionship as I did with the Limping Doctor, heretic though he is proclaimed across this Empire of Albion.

Parted not through death, though it brushed us with its feathery scales more than once in our endeavors. No, it seemed that our lives were turned around by an impossible happenstance, as miraculous in nature as our own victory.

It began with a simple return to Baker Street, a place that drew me back like a lodestone however far I roamed. It was home, had been for years with James, though our rooms were more akin to an abandoned arsenal more than ever, not a place for greeting visitors and holding consultations with fine gentlemen and gentle ladies as it had been in our hey-day. It was where I stopped to repair weapons and replace clothing and equip a new pack for travel to the next suspected breach.

On this day, the snow lay thick in the streets London still and as I climbed the stairs, I registered the smell of smoke and blessed Mrs. Hudson for setting the fire in advance for I could see the lamplight already, welcoming me home with its buttery light. It was only as I opened the door that I realized the smoke was pipe tobacco, and the familiarity of its presence impacted my mind like a blow even as I saw a familiar shadow and shape sitting in a chair I had studiously avoided using in my occupation of the rooms.

His chair. His impossible shadow.

I wanted to say his name, to touch the word in my throat and feel it vibrate on my lips, as if proof that it was real, that the world around me was still real. But I could not speak, and I froze inside the threshold, bones locking into place with a sudden tremulous cold that I could not place.

I stood upon my own precipice of insanity for long moment, a sensation of falling out of control only occurring within the shell of my own shattered perception. For there before me was a ghost made flesh, sitting as if more than a year before I had not seen him tumbling into the embrace of a Royal and through a portal in the gaping maw of the Falls.

I am not sure what broke first, the cracked sound from deep in my chest or the half stumbling foot fall forward, either which forced me to reengage with the world around me, though my mind declared it fiction rather than reality. Sometimes I still wonder if all of this fiction if I am indeed trapped in my own mind and locked away in a madhouse, or still in the pits in Afghanistan. I leave that decision to you dear reader, as if you read this account, then surely I am real as the words on the page. The figure in the chair moved, a bare inclination of his head.

"Sebastian, I see I calculated your return correctly," he said and with those simple words my doubt was removed, but also the breath from my lungs as surely as if I had been struck. His eyes were bright, and glittering in the firelight and his mouth quirked in the manner that I instinctively knew meant to be his version of great humor, or perpetrating a wonderful jest.

My filthy pack was set on the ground and I have no recall of putting it there myself, nor of making any other sensible movement, though clearly I did these things unbidden by my conscious thoughts. "How?" It encompassed so many questions which danced in my mind.

"Calculating your return? A mere calculation of factors, and habits," James replied. “But of course you mean my presence. A mystery for the ages indeed. Some things are best left that way." he said with infuriating evasiveness.

It was ever his way, and I wondered if it was due to the Queen's trust of him. Not out of reverence but out of wanting to keep a plaything alive.

"Are you...?" Still human I wanted to ask though I don't know if he ever was on the same level as myself and other ordinary folk.

"Intact? Yes." It was not an answer to the question I wanted to ask but it sufficed. 

It encapsulated the major concerns, though I was not sure intact mattered much when it came to them. I edged nearer, willing my knees to bend and feet to lift, finally close enough to touch his shoulder, seeking body heat as proof.

He was solid, real and he turned his head to meet my gaze and for the briefest moment I was convinced I saw an iridescence much like light on the carapace of a beetle shimmer over the black center of his eye. James was returned but not unchanged unless it was my own mind giving me visions.

"I am real Sebastian, and I might be somewhat changed, but I am still your companion James Moriarty."

"I know what they did to me. I've seen what happened to other soldiers." Gibbering didn't always mean a ruined mind from my experience but sometimes something possessed by horror. Sometimes I'd suspected that something of the others, of royalty, had come back in the person and been incapable of using the body appropriately.

He looked at me for a long moment. "Their realm breaks the ordinary mind Sebastian. Perhaps it is to that you owe your survival as you are far beyond the normal soldier. I attribute my own survival to my extraordinary mind. There is so much I know now Sebastian, so much!" His face was paled and his eyes burned fanatically in darkened sockets, but I had seen him that way many times when upon a case and to my shame, the shock of his presence blinded me to some of the signs.

Here was a dead man sitting in front of me, animated and speaking, his physical mannerisms as they had ever seemed to be. "Do you know what is going on here?”

"Yes. And it is far bigger than you can comprehend Sebastian," he replied. "Sit, you are quite pale with shock."

It was odd for him to attempt to comfort me, after all over a year missing. "I've been out there killing these things as they encroach on us," I countered, because just then I needed no tender ministrations. I needed physical proof, I needed to be surer of what was before my eyes, and what my ears were hearing.

"Then tell me what you have surmised so far," he said gesturing again to the chair opposite him.

Reluctantly I took my place across from him, watching his eyes all the while. "Royals not our own are encroaching on our lands. Known ones, named ones that have been foretold of in ancient histories. The King in Yellow is dead, as are more, acts sanctioned by Victoria herself."

It was a simple way to describe the events, but accurate in my opinion.

"Indeed. And like the proverbial tip of the tentacle, that is all we see," James said. He leaned forward. "Now imagine if you can how the Royals and the Sleeping Ones truly go to war. This is but the opening arguments, your previous wars a spillover of discontent from That Place to here."

Truly, the suggestion changed nothing of my outlook -- as a soldier and a patriot. "And?"

"Before we have been toys and playthings. Insignificant or cherished pets at best. Now we have proven a threat. Victoria Gloriana rises meteoric and old alliances shift and collapse, feeding grounds move and with it treaties crumble," James recited it with an edge in his voice, hysteria or mania I did not know, all the more chilling for his calm. "War comes to Albion on bloodied wings, the Sleeper stirs and prophecies thunder in the deeps." 

It felt final, and unarguable, and I looked away for a moment before running my hands through my hair to feel something, to ground myself. To feel of the earth and Albion as my mind fought the urge to panic. "Then we have no recourse but to do what we have already been doing -- to fight."

"For Victoria Gloriana and Albion," James raised a toast and smiled and I could see a reflection of the Abyss in his dark eyes.

It seemed surreal even now as I write this chronicle, that we could discuss the end of the world in such terms, with such calmness.

I had felt something greater coming in my battles beside John, had sensed the change, but the details, the knowledge of alignments behind earthly forces that was as yet unknown.

Even knowing this was more than most would handle and remain sane. John knew however, and he always searched for answers, and solutions. Had he once again mirrored my life and had walked to his home to find a ghost made flesh standing there?

I wondered but did not ask if the hunting dog, Rache, yet lived. It was a marvel that James sat before me but it heralded our doom, a weakness in the walls between. Had dead remained dead, perhaps we would all be on firmer footing now. But the sky still cracks bright dune colors and red, and I think of Afghanistan as we wait and watch the ships draw nearer to our shore.

It seems strange that those we once pursued are now allies. James fights his battles in the landscape of the mind as does his counterpart, but there comes a point where action is a necessity. When I fight now, it is not always thoughts of James that protect my mind from the horror that batters at my sanity

I feel guilt, that what had once been my most steadfast affirmation of reality was now a lesser anchor, though James himself was no lesser in his brilliant deductions. The immediacy of physicality required for battle, though...

I do not need a deeper understanding to prepare for damnation.

I fear that it is damnation we face now, for the prophecy brought back from the beyond was of our enemy’s plans to wake the sleepers of sunken R'lyeh off our shores. By what twisted manipulations they contrive to use this legendary horror as a weapon I do not know, but the waking of a Great Old One and its aeon deprived cavernous hunger is something I strive to comprehend and failed in the attempt.

Our forces were unable to shift focus from anything except the banishment and end of the hungers and threats that would soon harry our shores, and my time alone with James did not provide comfort regarding what would lay on the other side of the attack.

For my own mind, the wakening of a Great Old One who had not fed in recorded history would be tantamount to laying waste not just to Albion but to the world itself. The way out of this situation is not one I could perceive with my soldier’s eye. It would be a pyrrhic victory at best for those left, but then perhaps humankind was considered dangerous enough now it had slain those of Royal blood that it was not worth preserving by those who reign over us.

I found then, with James' answers mysterious and doom-laden my thoughts turned more to the easy discourse with my opposite.

I could no longer connect with James on any mere mortal level, and I could find no comfort in his presence. Our gathering doom pressed other issues into concern, and the general acknowledgment that all would fight to their end. In the end, I met him only a day past, as we stand on the eve of war.

"Tell me, have you been... well?"

"As well as can be expected," he replied his limp pronounced, no doubt exacerbated by weariness. "I would ask after your own health but I can see you have been troubled."

"James returned. I suppose it speaks to the weakness of the veils between the worlds." I wished I had better news or that to come bearing some solution.

"Likewise has Sherlock," John replied. "The both of them returned some time ago. Sherlock has told me authorities were not unaware."

"At this point, who is there to still be concerned?" The lack of concern, the pivot society had taken toward fighting those not ours, was damning testament to what society had become. "Did he know anything more of use...?"

John looked at me. "He has not been...unaffected by his experience. At times, lucidity is something that eludes him." I noted a hesitation, a faint frown that I recognized from our previous association as something more being withheld.

I waited, watched, hoped he would offer it without further prying, but I added after a silence, "Tell me. The pieces I have are incomplete, and I fear..."

"You know of course of the enemy's plan?" John asked and I nodded in response. "All lore tells us there is no hope and logic concurs and yet…"

He paced awkwardly, agitated by his knowledge. "Mycroft Holmes found us. I was not there when he arrived and came upon them unseen. He was asking in tones of great urgency, where it was, had he found it? That all rested on his recollection."

"So there is hope." And it rested in a madman who might know nothing at all. And James, sure of his sanity, though I was less so, had been little more than a raving madman peering into a scrying ball for all the good he had done.

"I believe that Mycroft Holmes permitted the crossing over of the Fall with this purpose in mind," John replied. Carved of the purest Arctic ice indeed to make of his own blood and greatest ally a sacrifice. "It makes sense in that the world would be forfeit if there was no means to stop them and Victoria Gloriana is fond of her feeding grounds."

I wondered what it was, though soon I knew; and the task went to them, them who could slip away. Because they hadn't functioned in society, they could function beneath it. My profile was too high, and the risk was too high to send... all options after the tools of one of the more human formed Elder Gods.

It was conjecture, and John's interpretation of Rache's fevered recollections as he elaborated in detail; to seek the Silver Hand of another God, who had quelled the hungry ones in ancient legend. Worse still than the news of failure until we stood upon the brink once again.

It is perhaps John Watson's last words to me that I record before this cataclysm break upon us within the next few hours. I cannot shake the words from my mind or the look in his eyes.

"If hope is lost, I ask if you would come with me into the breach to seek that which sent the Great Old Ones dormant before. I cannot promise anything more than the scraps of lucid recollection Sherlock has imparted to me, only me fervent belief that he has seen it and it exists. I believe I have a memory now strong enough to retain my sanity and purpose."

I knew of the memory of which he spoke.

I watch now the sky shimmer, purple and gold and dark, the dark seeping green, and I know that hope is lost. My time on the front lines is coming to an end and I know that it was time to find him, and the abyss.

There is no bravery in my action, simply desperation. I do not know whether the protection afforded by memories and feelings will work now the ones of James have been tainted, though I too have one to turn to if I can face what it means. There is no choice; Cthulhu wakens, the chant of the Yog-soggoth makes strange harmonics in the air.

I leave this chronicle as a testament to our action, that if we should be lost others may find a means to victory. Until then, I will walk into that breach by his side and I commend my soul and that of my companion to whatever gods can find them in that netherworld abyss.


End file.
